Optimize Your Mindset

As your mindset goes, so goes your life! This is true for your business life and every other corner of your life.

Your potential for excellence very simply demands that you consistently pay attention to the caliber of your thought life. This is your responsibility. This cannot be delegated. No one else can manage your mind but you.

Your mindset is productive if your thoughts are predominantly optimistic and centered on your current blessings and your future goals. It is especially important and advantageous to remain positive, grateful and goal-directed when most everyone else is not.

There is a counter-productive human tendency, particularly in tough times, to zero in on the things that are “out of whack” and forget about all that is working in our careers, in our relationships, in our community and in our country.

This is easy to do, especially if we are not spiritually grounded or at least, strategically insulated from the continuous downpour of gloom and doom reports of “breaking bad news” and other mental junk food.

With an optimized mindset, however, you’ll be more energetic, creative, focused, productive, attractive, and most importantly, receptive to God’s will. In short, you will be a more effective person. In this post, I’ll share three practical strategies to build momentum toward a stronger, more successful mindset.

Be Decisive

Nothing of consequence happens until you promise yourself that you’ll become the most positive and mentally resilient person you know, regardless of the challenges and difficulties on your path.

Raise your standards! Become an inspiration to others. Everything else flows from this key decision to separate yourself from the herd mentality, from the vast majority who blame, gripe, protest, gossip, even riot, and predict the sky is falling. Life is short.

Refuse to buy into this mass hypnotism…Take a stand and upgrade your commitment right now. Demand more from yourself in 2017 than you ever have before.

Bookend Your Day with Positive Mental Nutrition

One of the simplest ways to reduce stress and anxiety is to begin and end each day with what I call Positive Mental Nutrition™. Feed your mind with your goals and dreams, inspirational ideas, spiritual truth, and motivational nuggets for ten minutes or so immediately upon awakening each morning and right before drifting to sleep each evening.

During these two time periods, your mindset can be easily influenced for good or for bad. Make sure your inputs are positive, healthy, and goal-directed. Read, visualize, affirm, pray, and rewrite your goals…and practice feeling thankful and appreciative for what you’d hate to wake up without tomorrow morning.

Defeat the Big Four

It’s easy to be negative, cynical and defeatist. It takes no effort or discipline at all. Furthermore, the consequence of sustained negative thinking is inevitably negative emotions…which in turn provoke more negative thinking.

Worse still, a vicious cycle of stubbornly justified negativity can quickly become deep-rooted and hard to overcome. In my observation, the top four negative emotions include fear, worry, blame, and guilt. These terrorize your potential and immobilize your efforts toward developing an optimized mindset.

Watch out and be alert. When you begin experiencing results you don’t want or did not expect, it’s easy to get spooked and start thinking more about potential losses than potential gains. But, this unhealthy mindset sparks more worry or what I call upside-down goal setting, where you vividly imagine what you don’t want, instead of the other way around.

To transfer the burden of worry, you will often blame someone or something outside of yourself. Alternatively, you may exaggerate your role in the negative events and experience guilt.

Harboring grudges and hostility against anyone, including yourself, tends to attract more circumstances to be upset about. What’s the antidote? Practice forgiving somebody every day for real or imagined transgressions. The better you become at forgiveness, the more positive you can become as a human being.

God does not want us swept up in negativity and negative emotions are not His will for us. Therefore, don’t ignore. Instead, deal with them directly, and at their root, by refusing to entertain the thoughts that fuel them.

This last point is very much worth reinforcing: To optimize your mindset, deliberately steer your thinking toward what you want instead of what you don’t want…and keep it there most of the time.

What are a couple of steps you could take to bolster your mindset over the next 90 days?

3 Comments

Judy
on March 4, 2017 at 2:49 am

Increase my praising & thankfulness for all that God has blessed me with, from the great Big, to all those things we take for granted — our finely tuned working bodies.
We are truly blessed, if we would only take time to reflect!